Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to methods and systems for detecting and managing water leakage in a water cooled computer system.
Background of the Related Art
Computer systems are being designed and built with an ever increasing number of heat generating components. Given the limited footprint of most computing systems, a continuous increase in the number of heat generating components creates challenging heat dissipation issues. If these issues are not dealt with adequately, high temperatures can harm the structural and data integrity of the computer system, making the effect felt both at a system and component level.
Most electronic packages or nodes in large computer environments are housed in chassis disposed in racks. Traditionally, these nodes have been cooled by forced air cooling using air moving devices, such as fans and blowers, selectively disposed somewhere in the environment to allow optimum air flow. These air moving devices are often designed to displace hot air away from the components by creating parallel air flow paths that circulate through the chassis and rack. Air moving systems may take the form of a computer room air conditioning (CRAC) system, a chassis fan system, or a group of fans in an individual node or group of nodes.
As the density and performance of heat generating components increases, air cooling solutions are becoming more prohibitive and costly. In recent years, attention has been directed to cooling high heat flux microprocessor modules. However, with an increase in bandwidth and server throughput, large amounts of on-board memory with increasing power consumption are also required to achieve increased performance. There may be many different ways in which water-cooling can be beneficially used within a compute system.
More recently, direct or indirect water cooling has become a more attractive option for the designers of computing systems. Water cooled structures have been shown in some circumstances, such as large data centers, to consume less energy. However, these water cooled systems are susceptible to leak and require periodic maintenance to prevent the water from damaging the very computer systems that are being cooled.